The Red Museum

Middle East | Tue, May 19, 2009 at 8:52:55 am PDT

Here’s Jerry Weinberger’s Iraq Journal, on a visit to Saddam’s chamber of horrors.

There is nothing cold about the faces one sees on the walls of the Red Museum, where from 1979 until the uprising in 1991, Saddam tortured and killed in pursuit of the Kurdish rebels. Though Saddam usually buried his victims in mass graves as far as possible from where they lived, he had no scruples about compiling a photographic record of the killing. The first photo one sees freezes the blood. It looks like a picture in a college yearbook: a class of 13 young men, perhaps a debating or a Latin club, except for the anxiety evident in their eyes. The legend informs that it was taken in the prison in 1986 and that all but one of these young men were tortured and executed. Then photo after photo shows a bloody body crumpled at the foot of the stake to which the victim was tied to be shot. In one photo, two Baathist security men, grinning widely beneath their mustaches, hold up a headless corpse, their free hands raised in the victory salute. Next comes a picture of three women—child, mother, and grandmother—with faces frozen in fear just before their execution for suspected connection with rebels in the mountains. Numerous images record the last minutes in the lives of such women and children.